


Free in all the ways that you are not

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [13]
Category: Fight Club (1999)
Genre: Gen, Identity Porn, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:26:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23460154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: I really loved Fight Club, and the only thing I would love more is an AU that swaps the roles of Marla Singer and Tyler Durden.
Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467382
Kudos: 15





	Free in all the ways that you are not

The Narrator meets an incredibly charismatic woman named Marla Singer at one of the support groups he sneaked his way into, and she slowly but surely draws him into her strange nocturnal life. It turns out she runs her own group, calling it Alive Anonymous - she begins every session by stating ‘My name is Marla and I’m alive.’ She says it’s a 12-step program for people addicted to living, who keep on living even though they know it’s bad for them and harmful to everyone around them. Alive Anonymous has a bit less bare-knuckle fighting than Fight Club would, and a bit more psychological abuse, but things do still come to blows quite often.

The group grows and grows, desperate people taking out their despair on one another and going home clean, absolved. If you listen to her monologues, that seems to be Marla Singer’s point: truth in morbidity, kindness in vilest viciousness, life in death. She reduces her people to tears and snot and vomit, then remakes them into something different, something brand new and better. That is what she wants to do to the whole world, person by person, city by city. The Narrator is terrified but thrilled. Marla’s schtick is entirely crazy, but it seems so inexorably right and true and applicable to his own miserable life, he can’t help but follow her. He quits his job, he moves in with Marla and helps her build a real home for Alive Anonymous. The Narrator doesn’t even notice when it crosses the point of no return and develops into a full-blown death cult. (Keep the lye burn scene - that still happens, that needs to happen in every universe.)

Around the same time, the Narrator meets this guy named Tyler Durden, and gets into an exhilarating fist fight in the middle of a parking lot. He doesn’t get the time to decide if he’s more charmed or more annoyed by Tyler’s upbeat nihilism, because Marla Singer steps in, and hits on Tyler immediately. The Narrator doesn’t know what she sees in him, but the whole house echoes from their sex noises, and afterwards, Tyler keeps trying to be friendly with him. He even seems to flirt sometimes, it’s downright unsettling.

But the reason I wish I could tell this story is that moment of recognition. When some bruise-faced kitchen worker from two states away looks the Narrator in the eye and tells him flat out: ' _You’re Ms. Singer, ma’am.'_ When Tyler furiously tells him over the phone that he’s Marla, Marla Singer and they’ve been fucking, making love, for months now. Maybe there’s a second-hand bridesmaid’s dress, maybe there’s a ratty black wig, but maybe there was no need for that, because she tells him _we are the same person_ , and all the while Marla Singer has been the vicious, bloodthirsty, fucked-up, lethally clever woman he’d never let himself become. The woman who wanted to fuck Tyler Durden so she did, the woman who wanted to break her neighbours to remake them and she did, the woman who wants to level a city, and she will.

_I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not._


End file.
